My intention is to continue using the twenty-five flash fiction pieces I’ve employed in the past, but now integrating Twine as a composition tool to help students re-imagine the reading and writing experience in less fixed and linear terms.
Each student pair will be assigned a flash fiction piece and asked to create at least two “decision points” within the story—junctures at which the reader could be offered agency to determine the direction of the story’s forward motion. Student will then remix/expand the original published account by writing alternates – at least two middle sections and at least four concluding passages. The teams are free to include additional levels of expansion if they choose, but these numbers would be minimums for acceptable performance of the project. Their work should transform the original into a set of “twisty little passages,to use Nick Montfort's language.
The construction of this assignment invites thought and conversation regarding the nature of agency in the reading experience. Reader response theorists suggest that any interpretive enterprise is accompanied by a distinct sense of agency as the individual contemplating the page serves as architect for an entirely original rendition of the text that uniquely combines one tapestry of personal background knowledge with the creative output of an author. Here the text is a half-finished sculpture the author offers for a collaborative completion. New critical approaches would contest this perspective, alleging instead that the “meaning” of a work lies entirely, or at least largely, within the tensions already embedded in the text and that a strong reading of that work is universal to all competent readers. This simplified, polar snapshot of these theoretical perspectives complicate the nature of composing branch narratives. To what extent does a single set of highly defined options expand agency? How many choices would offer what we could safely call genuine agency? Is such a thing as authentic reader agency a concept in composition as we currently experience and understand it?
The other opportunity presented by this project is to experiment with the foreign cognitive tasks associated with composing within Twine, an environment that emphasizes modular units of storytelling rather than a single march forward from “beginning” to “end.” In our work together during ENGL 761, the example texts and theoretical readings offered a compelling case that writing in this space complicates and expands the process of constructing a story. While novelty has some value in engaging potentially jaded students in a general education course, I am also convinced that this format will provide a fresh opportunity to realize already existing course goals. Too often, these students consider the works we read to be static documents that were delivered full-form by their authors, failing to recognize the complex web of important choices evidenced by a published work. My hope is that studying stories for juncture points might foreground these determinative moments. In addition, crafting alternative passageways from the original will invite novice writers to recognize what opportunities were embraced and abandoned by the text’s author. By the conclusion of the composition challenge, students will have a fresh and useful awareness of the many unrealized texts imaginatively surrounding the set of realized choices present in a published text.
These focus points would not require abandoning some of the more standard goals of the literature course. Literary elements such as motfs and symbolism can now be addressed more actively as elements of a student’s remix rather than static component’s of an outside author’s work. If the original text, for instance, repeatedly foregrounded the notion of confinement, will any or all of the remixes continue that pattern in different terms or replace it with a fresh recurring image more relevant to their revised piece? If a dove with a broken wing is employed as a symbol of stunted potential, will that visual be reframed to fit the new text or replaced with a tangible object more in harmony with the intangible concepts emphasized by the new student version? Now, these interpretive tasks have more than mere conversation value – instead they guide meaningful revision(s) and their resulting engagement with the tools that made the original memorable.
Having offered, above, an account of ways in which this project might enhance or expand students’ progress toward existing goals, I would also argue that Twine as a composition space invites teachable moments not offered by linear texts. In her handbook, Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine, Melissa Ford offers a range of choice categories that authors might consider when constructing decision points within a branching story. This taxonomy (included as a visual above) could be presented as a mini-lesson in providing enjoyable balance in the agency offered a reader. This is a thought process entirely foreign to traditional creative writing tasks, in which the various flavors of agency an author might provide are not among the adjustable variables.
Each student pair will be assigned a flash fiction piece and asked to create at least two “decision points” within the story—junctures at which the reader could be offered agency to determine the direction of the story’s forward motion. Student will then remix/expand the original published account by writing alternates – at least two middle sections and at least four concluding passages. The teams are free to include additional levels of expansion if they choose, but these numbers would be minimums for acceptable performance of the project. Their work should transform the original into a set of “twisty little passages,to use Nick Montfort's language.
The construction of this assignment invites thought and conversation regarding the nature of agency in the reading experience. Reader response theorists suggest that any interpretive enterprise is accompanied by a distinct sense of agency as the individual contemplating the page serves as architect for an entirely original rendition of the text that uniquely combines one tapestry of personal background knowledge with the creative output of an author. Here the text is a half-finished sculpture the author offers for a collaborative completion. New critical approaches would contest this perspective, alleging instead that the “meaning” of a work lies entirely, or at least largely, within the tensions already embedded in the text and that a strong reading of that work is universal to all competent readers. This simplified, polar snapshot of these theoretical perspectives complicate the nature of composing branch narratives. To what extent does a single set of highly defined options expand agency? How many choices would offer what we could safely call genuine agency? Is such a thing as authentic reader agency a concept in composition as we currently experience and understand it?
The other opportunity presented by this project is to experiment with the foreign cognitive tasks associated with composing within Twine, an environment that emphasizes modular units of storytelling rather than a single march forward from “beginning” to “end.” In our work together during ENGL 761, the example texts and theoretical readings offered a compelling case that writing in this space complicates and expands the process of constructing a story. While novelty has some value in engaging potentially jaded students in a general education course, I am also convinced that this format will provide a fresh opportunity to realize already existing course goals. Too often, these students consider the works we read to be static documents that were delivered full-form by their authors, failing to recognize the complex web of important choices evidenced by a published work. My hope is that studying stories for juncture points might foreground these determinative moments. In addition, crafting alternative passageways from the original will invite novice writers to recognize what opportunities were embraced and abandoned by the text’s author. By the conclusion of the composition challenge, students will have a fresh and useful awareness of the many unrealized texts imaginatively surrounding the set of realized choices present in a published text.
These focus points would not require abandoning some of the more standard goals of the literature course. Literary elements such as motfs and symbolism can now be addressed more actively as elements of a student’s remix rather than static component’s of an outside author’s work. If the original text, for instance, repeatedly foregrounded the notion of confinement, will any or all of the remixes continue that pattern in different terms or replace it with a fresh recurring image more relevant to their revised piece? If a dove with a broken wing is employed as a symbol of stunted potential, will that visual be reframed to fit the new text or replaced with a tangible object more in harmony with the intangible concepts emphasized by the new student version? Now, these interpretive tasks have more than mere conversation value – instead they guide meaningful revision(s) and their resulting engagement with the tools that made the original memorable.
Having offered, above, an account of ways in which this project might enhance or expand students’ progress toward existing goals, I would also argue that Twine as a composition space invites teachable moments not offered by linear texts. In her handbook, Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine, Melissa Ford offers a range of choice categories that authors might consider when constructing decision points within a branching story. This taxonomy (included as a visual above) could be presented as a mini-lesson in providing enjoyable balance in the agency offered a reader. This is a thought process entirely foreign to traditional creative writing tasks, in which the various flavors of agency an author might provide are not among the adjustable variables.